This title shows how a group of primary schools transformed their learning and teaching. The authors share the practical strategies the schools used which led to significant improvements in children's motivation, behaviour, engagement in learning and learning outcomes.

"Gathering data and using it to inform instruction is a requirement for many schools, yet educators are not necessarily formally trained in how to do it. This book helps bridge the gap between classroom practice and the principles of educational psychology. Teachers will find cutting-edge advances in research and theory on human learning and teaching in an easily understood and transferable format. The text's integrated model shows teachers, school leaders, and district administrators how to establish a data culture and transform quantitative and qualitative data into actionable knowledge based on: assessment; statistics; instructional and differentiated psychology; classroom management."--Publisher's description.

"This book consists of 19 chapters on heuristics written by 21 diverse researchers. Heuristics are reflexive tools, designed to heighten awareness of actions and thereby afford reflection and other contemplative activities that can catalyze desired changes. The 33 heuristics provided in the book have been produced, revised, and adapted in more than two decades of scholarship. Six key foci are addressed in Transforming Learning and Teaching: Heuristics for Educative and Responsible Practices with respect to heuristics: teaching and learning, learning to teach, emotions, wellness, contemplative activities, and harmony. The book is an ideal resource for researchers in education and the social sciences, and an excellent text for graduate level courses in which research, professional development and transformative change are goals"--

Transforming Teacher Education through Service-Learning provides a fresh look at educational reform through the lens of teacher preparation. It poses the question “Why service-learning now?” as it discusses the meaningful ways service-learning pedagogy can transform the approaches used to prepare teachers to educate tomorrow’s children. The pedagogy of service-learning has significant implications for teacher education. Its transformative aspects have far reaching potential to address teacher candidate dispositions and provide deeper understanding of diversity. Knowledge of the pedagogy and how to implement it in candidates’ future classrooms could alter education to a more powerful experience of democracy in action and enhance the civic mission of schools. The current and ongoing research found within this volume is meant to continue support of the notion of educational reform. Because the vision we hold becomes the reality we experience, it is imperative to consider the question—Why service-learning now?—as we adjust teacher preparation programs to promote engaging opportunities for today’s youth.

Transforming Learning Through Tangible Instruction offers a transformative, student-centered approach to higher education pedagogy that integrates embodied cognition into classroom practice. Evidence across disciplines makes clear that people learn with their bodies as well as their brains, but no previous book has provided evidence-based guidance for adopting and refining its practice in colleges and universities. Collecting findings from cognitive science, educational neuroscience, learning theories, and beyond, this volume’s unique approach—radical yet practical, effective yet low-cost—will have profound implications for higher education faculty and administrators engaged in teaching and learning. Seven concise chapters explore how physical objects, hands-on making, active construction, and other elements of body and environment can enhance comprehension, memory, and individual and collaborative learning.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! How can teachers transform classroom teaching and learning by making pedagogy more socially and culturally responsive, more relevant to students’ lives, and more collaborative? How can they engage disaffected students in learning and at the same time promote deep understanding though high-quality teaching that goes beyond test preparation? This text for prospective and practicing teachers introduces engaging, innovative pedagogy for putting active and dramatic approaches to learning and teaching into action. Written in an accessible, conversational, and refreshingly honest style by a teacher and professor with over 30 years' experience, it features real examples of preschool, elementary, middle, and high school teachers working in actual classrooms in diverse settings. Their tales explore not only how, but also why, they have changed the way they teach. Photographs and stories of their classroom practice, along with summarizing charts of principles and strategies, both illuminate the critical, cross-curricular, and inquiry-based conceptual framework Edmiston develops and provide rich examples and straightforward guidelines that can support readers as they experiment with using active and dramatic approaches to dialogue, inquiry, building community, planning for exploration, and authentic assessment in their own classrooms.

This book follows three collaborative inquiry studies carried out by the author with other foreign language educators in Ireland, the UK and the US. The studies focus on the ongoing interaction between educators, student-teachers and language learners, and the project's aim is to examine the impact of 'transformative pedagogy'.